E-Conference Transparency - Summary Week 3 - The Way Forward

This summary aims to reply to the questions which were asked at the beginning of the third (and fourth) week’s discussion. The objective of the summary is to give a clear basis for follow up, activities and strategies.

How we can intervene?

Chetan Pandit (1) introduced the third week by stating that ‘’everyone agrees that corruption is not something that is unique to water sector” and he proposes that corruption is not in the domain of water sector experts but more the domain of sociologists, administrators, and legal experts. So, should we avoid any follow up and activities?

However, Chetan Pandit opened the discussion by asking how about some “supply side management” and transparency?

This question brought dynamism to the discussion. Corruption seems to have been perceived more on the side of the receiver and many contributions were written to change our perspective of analysis.

The question on the responsibility of donors for the lack of transparency was  raised by Peter Bury who emphasized  the fact that money is the cause of corruption and resources come from donors at different levels. Peter Bury advocates for an intervention from collective social control (empowerment)  rather than working with tools and guidelines.

Jose Carmelo Gendrano clearly expressed that in his empirical experience, he favours installing a system of delivering water projects parallel and if necessary separate from a graft-ridden governments. Is intervening with a parallel system the solution?

Concluding the discussion on interventions, Paul van Beers gave a quite pessimistic message as he perceived the problem of corruption to be a jungle and indeed not really in our WatSan expertise. The question now is: which actors are able to reduce corruption in this jungle?

In the  current economical and global context, where developing country governments face the burden of debt, where they can hardly pay the salaries of state employees, how can they finance and support the fight against corruption?

Are there already organisations working on this topic?

Evgeny Tyrtyshny from GWP Kazakhstan mentioned that the ATASU company is acting as initiator and member of the Kazakhstan Water Partnership and they have signed a statement supporting the Partnership Against Corruption (PACI) Principles -
http://www.weforum.org/site/homep...ontent/Partnering+Against+Corruption.

Dr Rao shared useful links and resources concerning transparency in the water sector http://www.irc.nl/page/23845 on different organisations, and conferences dealing with this topic.

However, Paul van Beers clearly mentioned that the costs involved in fighting corruption is a major constraint as fighting corruption costs money and time; probably more money than it will bring back to the right owner of the funds.

IRC does not have a fund to support these ideas but is implementing new activities, Kathy Shordt suggests to develop proposals in the medium-term.

Jose Carmelo Gendrano described 10 key methodological points that are used in his organisation to reduce corruption.

What methodologies should we use to ensure transparency and to develop guidelines and frameworks?

Guidelines proposed by Jose Carmelo M Gendrano working in the development sector in the Philippines

1)       Live simply: project heads are the moral standard for the rest of the organisation.

2)       Staff the project organisation as lean as possible to share quality information.

3)       Our guiding principle in recruitment (as well as in actual construction) is to ‘use the stone rejected by the builder’.

4)       Training: this usually means hands-on in an actual community project to absorb appropriate technology skills, and gauge and hone abilities to work with and stay in communities.

5)       Short-listing project communities according to need and willingness to participate.

6)       Community participation: it also entails willingness to be organized and trained for sustaining the water system and enforcing financially rational water tariff schedules so they can build up funds for repairs and replacement.

7)        Placing project resources as far forward as possible into the field.

8)       Using low-cost appropriate technologies: in this part of the world, appropriate technologies usually mean less materials and more labour-intensive. Knowledge monopolies are thereby reduced.

9)       Enhancing information flows: aside from practicing low-cost appropriate technologies and thereby disseminating and demonstrating them.

10)   Working with willing partners: in most projects, the nominal partners are a given.

Vinay Tandon emphasized the lack of communication between donors, ‘’they do not seem to talk to each other. There are states in India where nobody has a clue how much money is being pumped into say poverty reduction.’’ Could  better communication improve transparency? Learning alliances aim to improve communication so this framework could be experimented with for reducing corruption. 
Since it seems to be very expensive for the donor to monitor use/misuse of their funds, Tandon proposes that they use selected 'monitor groups' from CSOs including local representatives.

Paul van Beers thinks that privatisation can be a solution but it gives no guarantee for efficiency, effectiveness, gender and pro-poor approaches.

Who is interested to participate?

Kathy Shordt invites participants to different follow-up activities:

- Indian national group, which could  publish, for example, some of the best experiences and get  support from groups such as Transparency International.

- Start or support similar groups in other countries.

- Start an international virtual and thematic group to focus on preventive measures and tools (like those discussed in these weeks), experiments or research smaller scale 'best experience'.

- Donor meeting: to share experiences, focus on best practice.

Dr Rao has showed during all the e-conference strong enthusiasm on the topic and said the final goal should be to evolve tools and strategies to enable cost-effective supply of safe water and reduce corruption. He seems interested to join an Indian national group. Are the other stakeholders interested?

Paul van Beers again showed his pessimism when he said that at the end of the day, it’s simple; when someone gets more out of corruption than out of being honest and also gets away with it, including a smile of St. Peter at Heavens door, the choice is not too difficult. It seems that actually more people benefit from the corruption than are really concerned about it.

Laurent Stravato